Congress weighs Social Security changes on key terms, ID theft services

Even before they start receiving Social Security checks, millions of Americans rely on the Social Security Administration for information on when to claim retirement benefits and for help if their Social Security number has been compromised.

This week, the House of Representatives passed several bills aimed at improving the agency’s services, not only for prospective retirees, but also for identity theft victims — and children whose cards are lost or stolen. More than 300 million Americans have Social Security numbers.

Now it is up to the Senate to consider those proposed changes.

Here’s what the bills would do if they become law.

Eligibility for Social Security retirement benefits starts at age 62.

For most individuals, it pays to wait, particularly because the amount of the monthly benefits they stand to receive increases with time. By claiming what is now called full retirement age — typically age 66 to 67 based on birth year — beneficiaries stand to receive 100% of the benefits they’ve earned.

And by delaying even longer — up to age 70 — they stand to receive an 8% benefit boost for each year past full retirement age.

Nevertheless, many Americans don’t wait that long. Research published in 2022 found that just more than 10% of claimants wait until age 70. In the past two decades, the share of retirees claiming at age 62 has dropped, according to the Center for Retirement Research at Boston College. Yet data from earlier this year showed more people may be claiming as early as age 62, including high earners, according to the Urban Institute.

A new bipartisan bill — the Claiming Age Clarity Act, from Reps. Lloyd Smucker, R-Pa., and Don Beyer, D-Va. — would change the way retirement ages are described, with the goal of better reflecting those tradeoffs:

• Age 62, currently called the “early eligibility age,” would instead be called the “minimum monthly benefit age.”

• The full retirement age would instead be called “standard monthly benefit age.”

• Age 70 would be referred to as the “maximum monthly benefit age.”

“People are making an irrevocable decision that will affect their benefits for the rest of their lives, and they may not have all the information they need to to make that decision in the most considered way possible,” said Shai Akabas, vice president of economic policy at the Bipartisan Policy Center, a Washington, D.C., think tank that has advocated for the bill.

A Senate version of the bill, led by Sen. Bill Cassidy, R-La., currently has backing from Sens. Chris Coons, D-Delaware; Susan Collins, R-Maine; Tim Kaine, D-Virginia; and Bernie Sanders, I-Vermont.

“The unanimous vote in the House was quite compelling, and hopefully provides momentum for fairly quick action in the in the Senate” in coming months, Akabas said.

When a Social Security number is compromised or a card is lost or stolen, individuals affected must interact with multiple people at the Social Security Administration to resolve the situation.

A bill proposed by Rep. David Kustoff, R-Tenn., the Improving Social Security’s Service to Victims of Identity Theft Act, would require the agency to provide a single point of contact to better help consumers resolve the situation in a timely manner.

“Victims of identity theft shouldn’t have to fight their way through government bureaucracy just to get their identity restored,” Kustoff said in a statement.

More than 1.35 billion victim notices were sent to individuals in 2024 following more than 3,100 data breaches, according to the Identity Theft Resource Center. More than 1,800 of those breaches involved Social Security numbers.

A Senate version of the bill led by Sen. Chuck Grassley, R-Iowa, currently has nine bipartisan co-sponsors.

A third bill, called the Social Security Child Protection Act, would require the Social Security Administration to issue a new Social Security number to children under 14 if their Social Security card was lost or stolen in the mail.

“Every child receives a Social Security number that follows them around for the rest of their life, and every year there are kids whose Social Security numbers are lost or stolen in the mail and exposed to fraudsters,” Rep. Lloyd Smucker, R-Pa., who introduced the bill, said during a speech ahead of the Dec. 1 House vote.

A 2022 Javelin Strategy and Research study found 915,000 children had been victims of identity fraud that year, prompting average costs of $1,128 for a single household and requiring an average of 16 hours to resolve.

It can take years before young adults realize their Social Security numbers were stolen or compromised, he said. Currently, the Social Security Administration replaces those numbers only after the holders have become victims of fraud.

The proposed bill would provide a “simple fix to protect our children,” Smucker said.